Popular streamer Steven K. Bonnell II, better known on YouTube and other platforms as “Destiny,” has been sued for violating a federal “revenge porn” law.
The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in a Florida court and obtained by TheWrap, claims Destiny intentionally shared a video of himself having sex with a woman with a “random fan” in 2022 — a move that led to the video being leaked online in 2024 and viewed at least 78,000 times. The lawsuit says the plaintiff, identified as Pxie, a smaller politics-focused creator with about 25,000 followers, was identified by Internet trolls once the video was leaked — leading her to become “suicidal” due to the “extreme humiliation, distress and emotional suffering” it caused.
Destiny, who has 840,000 subscribers on YouTube and 289,000 followers on X, appears to have admitted to the plaintiff in a November 2024 message that he had shared the leaked video without her consent, the lawsuit notes.
“I’m so sorry there’s literally no excuse, I’d had phone convos and stuff with this person they were fairly close to me, it’s worthless to say it at this point but I’m super sorry, there’s literally no excuse,” he told the plaintiff, according to the lawsuit.
The lawsuit also says Destiny started “destroying evidence, including text messages between him and the plaintiff” in late January, once he knew a lawsuit was likely being filed. It also claims that about 15 women reached out to the plaintiff and said Destiny had shared sexually explicit images of other women with them, without the consent of the women in the pictures.
In a YouTube video titled “Destiny Addresses His Lawsuit” out Thursday, the streamer said he had waited to comment on the matter to “minimize publicizing both mine and other people’s explicit material.” He did that, he said, primarily because the plaintiff had said she would “kill herself” if the sex clip was ever seen by her parents. Earlier in his YouTube video, Destiny shared what he claimed is an early December message he sent the plaintiff in which he said, “I have not confirmed/denied anything at all publicly and I will never do so.”
Destiny further said he waited to publicly comment on the leak to allow the plaintiff “the maximum room possible to negotiate some sort of settlement with me, without me having to come out with a statement of my own that sheds more light on her character and her behavior.”
He continued: “There is always room for improvement in my own behavior, and I’ve obviously reflected on and changed the way I’ve engaged with people in this space over the past couple of years. This entire ordeal involves a video recorded five years ago and sent three years ago [in April of 2022].”
Destiny then said it was “irritating that my prioritizing Pxie’s well-being at every stage of this after the leaks has resulted in me being maligned so heavily, but alas.”
Two days before the lawsuit was filed, Destiny called the pending legal claim a “racket” in a livestream and said the plaintiff’s lawyers were looking to get $15 million out of him.
The plaintiff is seeking a jury trial, at least $1 million in punitive damages for violating revenge porn law and at least $1 million in compensatory damages for intentionally inflicting emotional distress.
